Two United States journalists were on Monday night facing the possibility of spending 18 months in jail for refusing to reveal the identity of a source within the Bush administration who leaked the identity of a CIA agent.
The supreme court on Monday in effect rejected an appeal from the reporters against the prison term when it refused to hear the case.
The decision was denounced as a blow to the independence of the press by media organisations, but it was unclear whether Matt Cooper of Time magazine and Judith Miller of the New York Times would go to prison.
Their lawyers intend to present new arguments to a federal district court in Washington, which is due to hold hearings this week on the journalists’ sentence.
Without giving its reasons, the court upheld a ruling by a lower court that Cooper and Miller should be held in contempt and jailed for refusing to testify in an investigation into the CIA leak.
The CIA agent unmasked by the leak was an undercover expert on weapons of mass destruction, Valerie Plame, whose husband, Joseph Wilson, a former ambassador, had questioned United States President George Bush’s claims that Saddam Hussein was trying to buy uranium in Africa.
Wilson claimed the July 2003 leak, a crime under federal law, had come from a senior official in the Bush administration as a form of retribution against him.
A federal grand jury investigation was launched into the leak but has yet to issue any charges.
Neither Cooper nor Miller was the first to publish Plame’s name. Miller did not even write a story about the affair, but both were subpoenaed by the chief investigator, Patrick Fitzgerald, to reveal their sources.
Plame’s name was first published by a conservative columnist, Robert Novak, who has refused to say whether he was subpoenaed over his sources.
”I am extremely disappointed,” Miller said in a statement issued after the supreme court decision. ”Journalists simply cannot do their jobs without being able to commit to sources that they won’t be identified. Such protection is critical to the free flow of information in a democracy.”
Time magazine, which is being fined $1 000 a day for refusing to reveal Cooper’s source, said it would fight the jail order in the district court on the grounds that circumstances had changed since the sentence was imposed.
Reports from the investigation have suggested that it has decided that the leak of Plame’s identity did not represent a violation of the intelligence identities protection act, and is concentrating instead on the possibility of perjury charges.
By its decision, the supreme court opted out of a long-running legal battle over the rights of reporters to keep sources secret.
The last time the court intervened in the argument, in 1972, it ruled that a reporter who witnessed a crime could be called to give evidence before a grand jury.
A consortium of news organisations which had sought the supreme court’s intervention said: ”Important information will be lost to the public if journalists cannot reliably promise anonymity to sources.”
In its last public session of its term, the supreme court ruled on both sides of another divisive issue: the legality of public displays of the Ten Commandments.
The court ruled by a 5-4 majority that they could not be displayed in a courthouse, because such a display violated the separation of church and state.
But in another 5-4 ruling, the court upheld the right of the Texas state government to display a monument inscribed with the commandments in the grounds of the state capitol.
The majority argued there was a legitimate historical and secular purpose to the display.
Monday’s supreme court session was closely watched for any sign that the chief justice, William Rehnquist, or another of the court’s elderly judges might retire, sparking a fierce political battle over a successor.
Justice Rehnquist, who is being treated for thyroid cancer, gave no hint of when he might step down. – Guardian Unlimited Â